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All posts for the month December, 2008

Five hours and 27 minutes. That is the average time you will spend getting treated in an emergency room in Arizona. We rank 45th in quality of ER care, and 48th in availability.

Whether you have a serious emergency or just an important health concern, the emergency room is where you must go if, like millions of Americans and Arizonans, you have no health insurance. They are required to treat you, even if you can’t afford to pay. So, the ER is packed 24 hours a day with people needing treatment that, while urgent, could otherwise be treated in a doctor’s office or clinic.

And that doesn’t mean it’s FREE. They will bill you for thousands of dollars, which of course you can’t afford to pay, and then when you don’t pay it, that goes on your credit report, making it harder or impossible to get a loan.

If you’re uninsured and not wealthy, don’t even think about preventative health care or regular checkups. Just wait till a problem becomes serious enough and take it to the ER.

Why is Arizona worse than most other states? Because we have more than our fair share of Republicans. (What’s a fair share of those? Well under 50%, though none at all would be ideal) Our political elephants provide only a minimal state health system for the poor, and you have to be very, very poor to qualify. They enacted anti-union laws, which not only keeps wages lower than average but results in fewer employers offering health insurance benefits.

Not just in Arizona, but throughout the US, we are less healthy, yet pay more to get that way, than people of many other nations. Write your Congressperson. Support Barack Obama as he works to establish national universal health care for all Americans.

An ominously undemocratic move by the Prime Minister of Canada: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081204/ap_on_re_ca/canada_political_crisishas revealed a seldom-noticed detail about the country’s political status– Canada has a Governor-General who represents the Queen of England, and evidently she has the power to authorize the Prime Minister to shut down Parliament.

This is a bit unsettling. It is one thing to have a theoretical ceremonial tie to the British Empire, but that the Queen’s representative would actually act to suspend the elected legislature to protect a Prime Minister from being voted out is, as the story says, unprecedented, and I would imagine rather worrisome to Canadians.